Asked for updates, he said ansem.io is being reworked from its original shape — a launchpad layer and index for on-chain coins — because the launch flow made coins too easy to snipe, and the fix is the main change shipping. Three things are running in parallel (ansem.io, Market Bubble, Bullpen) and he claims all three are "value accretive to ANSEM," with more detail "probably beginning of next week." On Phantom he was unreserved: it is the wallet that made Solana usable (he contrasted it with Sollet, whose UX he called horrible during his early DeFi days), it now does far more than hold tokens, and "we're gonna be doing a lot with them."
His framing: the CFTC said it will take no action against DeFi software that enables on-chain activity, which he argues ends the pattern of front-ends getting sued and founders being afraid to ship features, and means protocols are no longer blamed for how their software is used. He tied it to Hyperliquid being legalized in the US with Kraken as the venue enabling it, and to stablecoins strengthening the dollar by putting US-backed money into global activity it wouldn't otherwise reach. Separately, the SEC announced an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks — which until now were not designated for US users — opening the door to more developer activity around them.
Ansem called Vlad Tenev's recent commentary the loudest crypto endorsement from a mainstream brokerage, citing his line that holders will be able to redeem tokenized stocks in kind for real shares at their brokerages and exercise the same shareholder rights on chain. He noted Robinhood's traditional business does roughly $4.5B a year and that tokenization adds a revenue line the company has no exposure to today, while the older brokerages have entrenched customers who don't churn — so capturing the younger generation is existential for HOOD. His call on air: the stock has an all-time high near $150 and he expects it "trading 200 plus" by the end of next year, with the trading-fee economics of on-chain speculation (terminals and launchpads charging high fees on volume people are willing to chase thousand-x returns with) as the reason crypto revenue lines are so valuable.
Asked whether the market overreacted to the Clarity Act failing, he said the market barely went down, and that when bad news stops moving price it is typically because it is priced in — which skews the tape to the upside because the marginal seller reacting to that headline isn't moving the market. His evidence: Zcash is up around 20% since the denial. He also argued the US regulatory environment is shifting structurally for crypto, pointing to the volume of pro-crypto commentary from Robinhood's CEO over the past few weeks.
He repeated the call he has made every episode, now with receipts: first mentioned at around $300, trading near $1,500, which he counted as a 5x, and he says he is up "a smooth six figures" on it and has stopped treating it as a low-cap. He pegged the market cap in the ~$22B area and compared the setup to Bitcoin in 2017 — roughly $1,000 in January, $20,000 in December — on the grounds that Zcash needs no execution and no applications built on top: it is purely a private store-of-value trade that anyone can understand, which is why it memes well. His target logic: Bitcoin sits near a $1.5T market cap, and Zcash reaching 10% of that as "the private version of Bitcoin" makes sense to him. On the on-show Polymarket question of Zcash above $2,000 by December 31 — about a 30% move from $1,500 — his answer was "slam yes," adding "it's not a coin flip" and that this year and next will be strong for it.
His case for the category: launchpads make too much money to disappear as long as new-pair trading activity persists and devs are incentivized to deploy, and he cited Pump over the past year paying creators roughly the same amount it kept in revenue — calling it one of the most successful crypto businesses ever, and durable because that revenue held through the bear. The unsolved problem he actually cares about is curating the coins that survive longer term, and designing incentives that align coins with holders across a longer horizon: "the game is not solved at all." He credited the long.xyz team (as-transcribed) for running a launchpad with no native token, deepening liquidity on pairs, and starting at higher market caps. On why Pump ships new features last: he reads it as deliberate protection of a core user base that keeps trading there, with the real strategy being ownership of end-user distribution — social trading and the mobile app, where new users arrive and can trade cross-chain whether or not the coin came from Pump's own launchpad.
He rejected the "traders are the new athletes" comparison because athletes' output can't be self-taught while trading can, but argued the category is genuinely new: streamed trading is entertainment and education at once, which no prior content format combined. Because only a small subset are both correct and digestible, he expects the best of them to be "worth their weight in gold" for sponsorships aimed at a younger generation coming into its own — the clip economics he cited was a trader hitting $800K on AMC live on a tweet. His own psychology rule, offered after admitting he was far too bearish at the cycle low and had to flip on the retest: if you are screenshotting an unrealized P&L to flex it, sell a little. He explained the mechanism the way he explains technical analysis working at all — at euphoria everyone is already allocated, so there is no buyer left; at fear everyone is already liquidated, so there is no seller left.
If forced into one stock for the whole bull market, he defaulted to Robinhood and then made the case for Meta as the under-discussed name: if open-source AI catches the leading labs, the companies with the most distribution win, and Meta can point its own models at ad targeting and spend per user while having kept its open-source posture. On alts, he said a lot of people who missed Zcash are going to chase NEAR, which "does look really good" to him. The guest segment — the long.xyz founder (as-transcribed: "Long that XYZ") — covered Derive, the decentralized options venue: his argument is that perps produced the most successful platforms in crypto while options never took off, and Derive's revenue is "up and to the right." He took a viewer question on pair trades and said yes to building baskets where the denominator is a volatile asset (long Zcash / short Bitcoin was the example), wrapping both legs in one account, and riffed on the "real board seat" idea for tokenized AI-equity holders as something without a ceiling because it has never existed before. Ansem's verdict on the guest: he has been good at betting on people, "don't fade him," follow him — and the same founder's token went from a $1.3M market cap to about $20M and back to $1.3M along the way.